I can't has cheezburger

Overall, I really enjoyed this WWDC keynote, and it feels like one that belongs to the ages (after all, it’s not every WWDC that gets a brand new platform announced). WWDC events nowadays are a massive info dump sure to overwhelm every time simply because there are so many platforms now.

I want to focus on the two specific parts of the keynote that I made posts about this past week.

Mac Pro

I figured there was about a 20% chance we’d see an Apple Silicon Mac Pro announced today, and we did!

Sadly, it’s a bit of a disappointment. I outlined three different approaches Apple might take to transitioning the Mac Pro to their own chips, and Apple sadly took the least ambitious approach of all, keeping the Mac Pro with the same general compute and memory limits of its other machines.

It’s a real disappointment that the very best Mac Apple sells now has a maximum memory capacity an eighth the amount of the Mac Pro that Apple announced four years ago (to say nothing of the fact that you’re stuck with memory soldered onto the board instead of being in slots for expandability). Gone are the highly innovative MPX modules that brought new dimensions of expandability.

Instead, Apple is apparently content to let the Mac Pro not try much of anything new, and spend the next several years catching up to its Intel counterpart in key ways.

This could very well be a transitional machine and Apple may very well have something more revolutionary up its sleeve for later, and I hold out hope that we might see that in a couple years.

Vision Pro

First off, kudos to Apple for coming up with a marketing name that was in no rumors at all.

For not having given much thought to AR/VR though, I currently feel like my prediction from yesterday is going to hold up well.

Even Apple can’t get past the dorky factor, though I believe it’s a nice piece of hardware. The fact remains that it’s awkward to have a headset on, and you need a damn compelling use case to convince the masses to wear something like this.

And to Apple’s credit, the OS does indeed look beautiful and it looks like the UI elements and interactions are well thought out.

But that’s not what’s holding AR/VR back. If there was indeed a use case that only AR/VR could serve, and if it was compelling enough, people would be buying VR headsets already and suffering through the clunky interfaces. But interest remains tepid.

Apple doesn’t seem to have put forth a killer app either. They seem to hope their killer app is “take general-purpose computing to have a radically spatial UI that’s nicely executed.”

Things like 3D video recording (and viewing) and substantially more immersive Disney movies sound nice, but none of them are nice enough that you’d buy dedicated hardware just for them.

Apple is marketing Vision Pro and pricing it like a brand new general-purpose compute platform. Apple’s track record with building up brand new compute platforms is a little shaky, though. The iPad is Apple’s most recent attempt at building a brand new general-purpose computer platform, and iPadOS has evolved at a glacial pace compared to the Mac’s evolution. Some concepts were a slam dunk for Apple (like their cursor support), but other things, like general-purpose multitasking, are these multi-year blunders Apple still hasn’t quite gotten right. And this is for a computing device that has tons in common with the Mac, in that both are 2D interfaces using a computer screen and a few different input methods. iPad has had close to a decade and a half to evolve and I couldn’t depend on it as a platform to get much of my real work done on. I have serious doubts about Apple’s ability to get VisionOS to a point where it’s a contender, to speak nothing about my hesitancy to fully embrace a platform where the only way to get apps on it is probably the App Store.

And looking at this OS, there’s still a lack of fundamentally new UI ideas. Apps are largely stuck in 2D windows that are projected into 3-space. That’s a bummer! If you are spatial there’s nothing stopping an app from being split up into many things to drive the metaphor home (hell, early Mac apps like Photoshop did that too). I don’t need a 3D headset to use apps whose UIs are primarily 2D; I can already do that on existing computing devices.

I’m not dismissing this product out of hand because I’m wiser than Steve Ballmer (if I’m being honest, I want one now more than I imagined wanting one yesterday). But I remain convinced of what an incredible long shot this product is for Apple. It will probably be a few years before there’s even a version of it I’d consider to be a proper v1 for an average consumer (it would need to come in under $2000, and probably even under $1000 to have a chance to sell in volume). And to use one is a bigger behavioral change than any computing device to date.

On the eve of WWDC I’m going to share my hottest of takes: there’s a decent chance that Apple’s VR headset ends up being a product that Apple tries but will ultimately exit the market.

It’s not that I think Apple will do a bad job with this product; if anything I think their execution is going to set the bar for the product category, and like the iPhone I think that future VR headsets from competitors are going to magically start looking and feeling like whatever Apple makes.

I’m bearish on VR itself. Specifically, I’m bearish on VR as a mass market product.

It’s interesting to me that Apple is entering this market. They’re very conservative about entering new markets, even though I think there are dozens of product categories they could do great work in. Apple may be the only company capable of getting VR to properly take off as a technology for the masses.

But a lot needs to happen for VR to really take off. Naturally, it’s going to need to get smaller and much cheaper, but I am confident Apple will solve those tech problems in the coming years if VR shows traction. But VR needs two very big things to happen to succeed, and they are tall orders.

First, VR needs a killer app. There needs to be an application that’s 1) only possible with VR, 2) is so compelling that people will literally buy the hardware just to use the app, and 3) is widely popular. VR will probably need a few killer apps. But a killer app for VR hasn’t surfaced so far elsewhere. And VR headsets have been pretty competent for years now, to the point where it’s been possible for someone to build a killer app on them. But collectively, I don’t think anyone has ideas for something that’s any good, and I don’t think that a better headset product from Apple will fix that.

Second, we’d need to make the technological leap past these headsets and toward something like the glasses Apple is rumored to also be working on. If there’s a good enough app people will tolerate the relative clunkiness of a headset, but eventually people are going to want something that’s more portable and able to integrate into everyday life. Not only is that going to help make the device feel less dorky, it’s going to open up use cases that aren’t feasible with the headset. With today’s tech, even with Apple’s access to very fast custom chips, just the headset itself is proving to be challenging. It’s hard building something with the display quality Apple demands at the tiny size needed for a headset. Transforming from that to something that can project an image onto transparent glasses lenses feels like the kind of effort that’s at least a decade away.

Apple historically has been great at taking products that exist, have traction, and that incumbent companies suck at making, and then reinventing the entire category. They did this with computers multiple times. They did it with personal audio players. They did it with the smartphone. They did it with tablets. They kind of did it with the smartwatch.

With VR, Apple needs to kickstart the entire category. And it’s odd because VR isn’t brand new. Companies have been working on it for years, and a lot of VR tech is quite mature now.

The other thing: Apple’s a big, big company. Their minor products have the sales of Fortune 500 companies. Around 9.6 million VR headsets were sold in 2022. If Apple sold 10 million a year, all for $3000 a pop, it would still be a relatively small business for them. When you’re bringing in upwards of $400 billion in revenues annually, your threshold for success is remarkably high. Hell, given the years this product has spent in the R&D phase it will face an uphill battle recouping that investment.

I’m smart enough that I know not to bet against Apple. However, if they are announcing a VR headset tomorrow at WWDC (and at this point I have to assume they are, because if they weren’t they would have quietly leaked that to the press to tamp down expectations), then this will be Apple’s biggest and riskiest bet to date.

And even if Apple doesn’t succeed at this, I like them being bold like this.

In the “free idea for Apple” spirit of my SwiftScript post from awhile back, I want to share a vision for the kind of AI-powered product Apple could incorporate into macOS and iOS: Spotlight Bionic.

Spotlight was pretty revolutionary when it was first announced back in Mac OS X Tiger. With really good indexing technology Spotlight made it possible to do full-text search on basically your entire Mac, and it was fast.

Apple has augmented Spotlight with some extra functionality over the years, but fundamentally the core Spotlight feature is pretty rudimentary. You can search your entire Mac for things, but you have to be searching for pretty much the exact thing that’s in the files in question to be able to find it.

Throw a sophisticated LLM-based AI into the mix, though, and that changes the game substantially. You’re still ultimately querying the same dataset (i.e. the data on your Mac), but an LLM lets you query the data like an actual human being.

One of the early ways we could explain the magic of computers was stuff like full-text search. You could be editing a big text file, trying to remember where you used the word “blue,” and because computers are fast, you’d be able to find the word almost instantly. Originally this was very inflexible and you needed to search for the exact string, but it was still a big leap forward and search has gotten more flexible as computers got faster, allowing you to make “fuzzier” queries that may not be the exact matching text but are close enough that the computer can find the match anyway.

AI brings us to a point where we can do that same kind of searching, but without the “you need to search for the exact thing” restriction. And that’s revolutionary.

That means, for instance, you could ask Spotlight Bionic for all of the emails from your mom where she sent a recipe, even if your mom didn’t specifically ever use the word “recipe” in these messages.

We already have machine learning powered image search in the Photos app, but Spotlight Bionic could supercharge it, letting you ask “what’s that Keynote presentation I made that had the Simpsons meme in it?” (As if I would have just one…)

Traditionally we’ve worked to overcome computers’ rigidity on search by attaching metadata to files, or by putting files in folders with a strong organizational structure.

But that strategy has limits. Maybe as a high school student you keep all your American Lit book reports in a folder of that title, but if you failed to one time and you don’t remember what you named the file, you might not be able to find it unless you had something concrete to go off of. There’s nothing wrong with that, but AI can help you find stuff without a need for that. Maybe it could even help you see relationships between different files on your computer! Imagine how handy it might be if you’re writing an essay on banking regulations, and you know you’ve got some prior work where you wrote about similar stuff, and Spotlight can just show you those documents.

AI search can get more capabilities too, if it’s trained to understand the relationships things on your computer have with one another. Maybe you want to do a search for recipes from your mom, but you only want it to show you recipes where you replied to the email and said you wanted to make that recipe. In theory, a robust enough email app could give you a querying language that could let you search for specific emails, like ones from your mother, then from that search show you a list of your replies, but it would be a complicated query (and without AI you’d still need to query for words you know the emails have, like “recipe”, for instance). But if you give the AI the ability to understand and see those relationships and map those relationships to human language, then this becomes something a computer can easily automate.

Apple’s really well-positioned to offer this, too. Apple Silicon Macs have chips specialized in machine learning, so all of this can be indexed by your own Mac instead of in the cloud, which is a win for privacy and it’s a win for Apple because they aren’t paying for all the server infrastructure that would be needed for that.

Thinking of this kind of AI as a search capability is still just scratching the surface of the capabilities it unlocks. If you generalize this AI to “a general-purpose way to translate human language into something a computer can execute” (which is essentially what it would be doing when you make a search query; it’s just executing a search), you can actually start to talk to your computer like a human and have it perform complex tasks for you. Siri goes from being a tool that can set timers and give you sports scores to being able to take those recipes from your mom and build a Pages file of a cookbook that you could then edit and send to have printed as a gift to family members.

At Microsoft’s Build conference this week while showing off features like this, Satya Nadella said that with the help of AI, every user could become a power user, and that’s really the thing that excites and energizes me about adding AI into existing products. If we can make AI good enough (and this is still a big “if”; AI demos today are super rough), we will be living in a world where my specific skill of being a computer power user might become somewhat obsolete (or radically evolve). I’ve always been able to do cool and useful things with computers because I took the extra time to be able to work with my computer and communicate to it what I need, and the computer can reward me with productivity. But soon we might be able to cut that middle man out, and people will just be able to ask their computers and devices what they need and the computers will do the heavy lifting of figuring that out and translating it to computer-speak.